The overall objectives of the research are: (1) To develop a framework for analyzing national decision-making for mental health services and programs in terms of (a) how public responsibilities are defined, (b) how policy objectives are chosen, (c) how approaches to the fulfillment of objectives are designed and selected, (d) how and to what extent performance or results are evaluated, and (e) how conflicts with competing priorities are resolved; (2) using this framework, to predict future policy contexts for national mental health decision-making and their implications for mental health care services and financing; (3) to develop a policy analysis and research agenda for mental health services. The proposed research has four distinguishing characteristics: (a) It conceives of decision-making in the public sector as the product of a system with interacting elements, i.e., the executive, legislative, and judicial branches and their principal components, organized interest groups, and public; (b) it seeks to evaluate the performance of this decision-making system in terms of policy outcomes, as distinct from political outcomes--i.e., votes on particular bills, the fate of specific political initiatives, or affirmation of the power of particular groups--or program outcomes--i.e. the numbers of patients treated in community based care facilities; (c) it explicitly conceives of outcomes as policy developments that take place over time--years and decades--as distinct from specific policy events, such as the enactment in 1973 of the Community Mental Health Centers Act, at a point in time; (d) it seeks to derive and verify hypotheses about how and why policy outcomes occur that cut across or are characteristic of different policy areas and that can serve as a basis for predicting the policy contexts and outcomes in specific policy areas. The work will be divided into four phases: (1) development of a pilot model of the policy development process and the conduct of case studies to test and revise it, (2) conduct of a larger number of case studies based on the revised model; (3) analysis of the phase two case studies; the further development of the model, and the derivation of hypotheses based on it; (4) application of the model to mental health services issues.